Gunnar Sonsteby

Gunnar Sonsteby, who has died aged 94, was one of Norway’s most decorated war
heroes, chief of operations for the underground resistance and sole
surviving member of a team of saboteurs helmed by Max Manus, the daring
leader of several numerous missions against targets in Nazi-occupied Norway.

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Gunnar SonstebyPhoto: NORWAY MUSEUM OF RESISTANCE

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Sonsteby (far left, with bicycle) as played by Knut Joner in a film about the Oslo GangPhoto: REX/EVERETT

6:06PM BST 10 May 2012

Sonsteby spent five years fighting the Nazi occupation. “When your country is taken over by 100,000 Germans,” he noted, “you get angry.”

In 1942 he became agent 24 in the Special Operations Executive. After saboteur training in Britain in 1943, he became the contact for all SOE agents in eastern Norway and head of the Norwegian Independent Company 1 group in Oslo.

This group performed several spectacular acts of sabotage; among them smuggling out plates for the printing of Norwegian kroner from the Norwegian Central Bank, and blowing up the office for Norwegian forced labour, a strike that wrecked the Nazis’ plan of sending young Norwegian men to the Eastern Front.

In 1945 he was awarded the DSO. As well as the attack on the labour office, Sonsteby’s citation records the theft of 75,000 ration books, which put pressure on the authorities, stopping a threatened cut in rations; the destruction of sulphuric acid manufacturing facilities in Lysaker; and destroying or seriously damaging more than 40 aircraft under repair at a tram company depot in Korsvoll. He was also credited with the destruction of a railway locomotive under repair at Skabo; a number of Bofors guns; a field gun and vital machine tools at the Kongsberg arms factory; and with starting a large fire in a storage depot at Oslo harbour which destroyed large quantities of lubricating oils.

Operating in occupied territory, and ranked high on the Gestapo list of wanted men, Sonsteby became a master of disguise. He operated under 30 or 40 different names and identities, and the Germans did not learn his real name until near the end of the war. They were never able to catch him.

As a young man, Sonsteby’s long face led to him being nicknamed “Kjakan” (“The Chin”). A British journalist who interviewed him in the spring of 2011 still found him “a fine reed of a man, thin, poised and dignified, like a Nordic Giacometti”. At 93 he retained a keen intellect, a charismatic and considered delivery, and an erect, military bearing; he would grip a stranger’s hand like a steel vice.

Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sonsteby was born on January 11 1918, growing up in the same Oslo neighbourhood as Manus – though the two did not meet until July 1940, when they worked together on an underground newspaper to counter Nazi propaganda.

At the time of the German invasion in April that year, Sonsteby had been a student working in a motorbike shop in German-occupied Oslo. “Oh, the humiliation of seeing those green-uniformed creatures tramping our streets,” he recalled in his memoirs, Report from Number 24. Even more galling were the hated Norwegian Nazis, or Quislings.

Then he met Manus, 25, who organised the rag-tag group known as the Oslo Gang that made some early efforts to sabotage Nazi assets. Initially progress was slow. “The first year, very little,” said Sonsteby. “Second, more. In 1941 I knew it would last.” Apart from Manus, an expert saboteur, the Gang’s inner circle included Gregers Gram, who ran propaganda campaigns. Sonsteby’s field was intelligence: “To find out how the Germans built up their power.”

As the Gang began to dent the Nazi machine in Norway, Sonsteby was extracted to receive specialist training with SOE in the wilds of Scotland. But he reacted badly to British military discipline. A potshot at Highland sheep almost got him thrown out. But his record and character were defended by Colonel JS Wilson, chief of the Scandinavian section of the SOE and later the head of the World Scout Bureau.

Wilson sent him back to active service in Oslo, Sonsteby parachuting in during a night-time RAF drop. “It was very special to come over Norway,” Sonsteby remembered. “Seeing the whole country in moonshine, landing on the snow in the mountains with our skis. It was just wonderful.”

He targeted munitions factories and troop ships during the occupation. Crucially, after D-Day, he set his sights on the Norwegian railways, preventing German reinforcements moving back to the front line.

Throughout, he had a simple, but strict, process of using various names and forged documents, moving from flat to flat almost daily. One refuge was above a bakery. “When I came to that baker’s shop I always looked at the girl selling bread. If she gave a special face I would know the Germans were there,” he remembered. “I would turn around.”

It was easy for Sonsteby to slip into fresh identities as he made all his false papers himself. With his forger’s hand, he could replicate the signature of Karl Marthinsen, the notorious leader of the Norwegian Nazi police. Marthinsen was central to the implementation of the Norwegian Holocaust and was “liquidated” on an Oslo street by the resistance in February 1945. In reprisal, nearly 30 Norwegians were executed.

The greatest fear for Sonsteby and his team was torture. When one co-fighter, Edvard Tallaksen, was picked up by the Gestapo in a café at Grünerløkka, he committed suicide rather than talk. Manus, too, was captured. Injured during an attempted escape, he was hospitalised under guard, only to escape again, down a rope from a second-floor window.

After the liberation of Norway, both the British and Norwegian intelligence services tried to recruit Sonsteby, but he refused. “I didn’t want any more war. I had had enough. I’d lost five years of my life.” Instead, in 1945, he left Norway for America and Harvard.

In 1946 Sonsteby became the only Nord to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords.

After Harvard he worked in the oil industry before returning to Norway and a career in private business. Throughout the post-war years and particularly after his retirement, he gave lectures to young Norwegians about the Second World War.

In 2008 the wartime biopic Max Manus, Gunnar Sonsteby was played by Knut Joner. The film ignited a fresh debate about how Norway and ordinary Norwegians had responded to the German invasion and subsequent occupation. Sonsteby attended the premiere with his wife, Anne-Karin, and the film became the most successful in Norwegian history, winning six Amanda Awards (Norwegian Oscars), including best picture, best screenplay and best actor.

In 2001 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s culture award. In the same year Sonsteby helped defeat a proposal to name a street in Oslo after the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who had welcomed the wartime German occupation of his country and given his Nobel Prize for Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria. At the time Sonsteby said Norway should dissolve parliament and declare a dictatorship before so naming a street. But in the end he came to consider that commemorating Hamsun was acceptable, as long as the writer’s literary talent and political affiliation received equal attention.

In May 2007 a statue of Sonsteby on Solli Plass in Oslo was unveiled by King Harald of Norway. Sculpted by Per Ung, it portrays a 25-year-old Sonsteby standing next to his bicycle.

The King and other members of the Royal family also honoured Sonsteby, on the occasion of his 90th birthday in January 2008, with a reception at Akershus Fortress, the site of the Gestapo’s wartime headquarters and now home to Norway’s Resistance Museum.

In 2008 Sonsteby was the first non-American awarded the United States Special Operations Command Medal.